Some years ago a friend asked me why I didn’t like pulp — why, in fact, I pretty much loathed it. It gets stuck in your teeth, and makes the orange juice too thick, I replied. Admittedly, I can now confess my sense of humor still needed work at that time. What can I say……
Today has been an extremely fruitful day so far! Not only did I tremendously enjoy my first American Tribal System belly dancing class with a new teacher, but she’s willing to barter with me for the training! That means I can actually take the class, thank goodness — especially considering my tightly budgeted finances as…
Some time ago I wrote a posting (which I’ve since lost track of) where I mentioned that in restaurants where you’re supposed to get your own silverware and napkins and stuff, it seemed to me that men either always sat down and waited on the women to put together a place setting for them —…
I have a nasty cold. It is no fun. I intensely dislike feeling like my head has been stuffed full of cotton wool and my brain is out vacationing in Timbuktu without me. Regardless, I’m trying to stay awake so I go to bed at a reasonable hour and don’t wake up at 3 am…
The apparently overwhelmingly powerful need to control women which some men appear to have is painfully expressed yet again in a form which is recorded by anthropology professor Barbara Tedlock’s research for her 2005 book Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion & Medicine. Granddaughter of an Ojibwe midwife and herbalist, and…
In the same year as Ely & Meyerson’s amazing article regarding the malleability of masculinity, Euro-American columnist Nicholas D. Kristof and Asian-American lecturer and business executive Sheryl WuDunn — both also married, journalists, and Pulitzer Prize winners — publish Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. In a sweeping, journalistic writing style…
Closely examining our matrifocal past and present offers a solid basis from which to theorize a possible healthier future — one not damagingly based in androcentrism. Such a future will not come about on its own, of course; if women are to regain their rightful positions as cultural creators and leaders then they will have…
Both Sanday (reviewed by me here and here) and Du are anthropologically trained ethnographers researching indigenous societies. As previously noted, their work offers explicit epistemological modifications of great benefit for a more humane, feminized science. This is not the only valid methodology available, however, to a women’s spirituality scholar, as is demonstrated by the next…
The following was part of a subsection in my comps essay which was titled “Theorizing Patriarchy Past & Present,” which performed said theorizing via a variety of epistemologies. I reviewed the hypothesized roots of patriarchy, surveyed the broad cultural expression of its impact on women of antiquity as well as more recent history, researched its…
…and now back to my comps essay book reviews! :) A more sweeping view of women throughout history, including both their loss of power and their struggle to both resist and reclaim it within the kyriarchy, is brilliantly demonstrated by English journalist, broadcaster, and social critic Rosalind Miles’ book Who Cooked the Last Supper? The…